


How It All Ends

by OmniscienceIsBliss



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Gen, Missing Scenes, Slight Canon Divergence, Spoilers for Book XIII, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-06-01 19:12:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15149951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OmniscienceIsBliss/pseuds/OmniscienceIsBliss
Summary: It starts very quietly. You’re walking through the market at midday; you try not to mind it too much when a sudden sense of weakness fills your limbs, your stomach, your head.——Spoilers for The Arcana game.A tale of how the Apprentice fell ill, following what is narrated in Asra’s and Julian’s Book XIII.





	How It All Ends

**Author's Note:**

> The last dialogues are taken directly from the books. Hope you enjoy!

It starts very quietly. You’re walking through the market at midday; in your hands is a jar full of leeches Dr. Devorak asked you to gather for his experiments. You try not to mind it too much when a sudden sense of weakness fills your limbs, your stomach, your head and throws you off balance.

“It must be the heat,” you mutter to yourself as you try to steady your body, blackness filling your vision for a few seconds. You find the nearest spot under the shadows and wait there for the faintness to fade away.

By the time you’re back at the laboratory, you have already forgotten what happened. Dizziness is nothing out of the ordinary anyway. These past few days you’ve been feeling faint more frequently than usual, but neither you nor anyone else at the lab has the time to worry about something as inconsequential as that when the Plague is taking over Vesuvia.

——

“You’ve been working non stop for weeks, you should try to rest,” you tell Julian. He doesn’t even bother letting out a bitter laugh, as he would have at least done not too long ago, as he unties the medical mask from behind his head and throws it away. His mind is too tired, even for spare breaths.

His auburn locks stick to his face; a thin layer of sweat on his skin and that deep frown of his you’ve repeatedly seen for the past month are all you need to see to know how his last experiment must have gone. Still, you ask him.

“The patient...?”

“Another lost cause,” he says, bitterly. “He’s not going to be alive by the end of next week.”

He lets his body fall on a chair with a loud thud, desperation taking hold of him as his hands, shaky from that last surgical attempt at finding a cure, run all over over his face, angrily but with a hint of resignation.

“I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. There’s nothing I haven’t tried yet. With every patient I try a new approach, yet no one ever shows signs of improvement. The herbs, the leeches, the transfusions, the bleeding method... I tried everything! But everyone just, unavoidably, dies anyway,” he sighs, and you wish you could kiss all that distress away from his eyes. If only it were so simple.

As a doctor, you know very well he must have gotten used to the sight of death at some point in his career, but his slouched figure betrays just how much the Plague has taken out of him nonetheless. One man can handle only so much death in such a short span of time.

The air around you smells of rotten flesh and death. The thick stench fills your lungs, and his as well. You put a comforting hand on his shoulder, and massage his back as gently as you can through the thick layers of protective lab clothing the two of you are wearing.

“Julian, you can’t keep doing this. You’ve been down here for far too long.”

He knows you’re right. But his pent up frustration prevails when he answers you.

“What should I do, then? Just let people die and do nothing?” he brusquely retorts.

“I’m not saying that. But you do need to take a rest, wear fresh clothes, breathe air and see the light of the sun once in a while. Closing yourself off from the world isn’t going to make it any better. You’ll tire yourself out before you can even think of a new cure,” you try to convince him. He falls silent. You are right, of course, but he doesn’t look up at you until he hears you search for something in the pocket of your vest. He silently watches you take out a white handkerchief and unfold it, and gasps when you, unexpectedly, lay it over his face.

“Wh- what are you...?”

“Shh. I know how particular you are about infection risks, Dr. Devorak,” you tease with a smile. You see Julian’s shoulders tense up for a moment, just to relax again as soon as he feels you planting a kiss on his temple through the fabric. You’re both wearing lab clothing, but, as he always reminds you, one can never be too careful with contagious diseases.

You start to move backwards, ready to break the contact, but he doesn’t let you leave so soon, lifting his arms to hold you still. Blinded by the handkerchief covering his face, Julian goofily searches for your mouth, planting a trail of kisses all over your face, sounds of longing escaping his parted lips as he does so.

When your lips finally meet, it’s the sweetest kiss you’ve shared in a while. It’s the _first_ kiss you’ve shared in a while.

“Thank you,” he whispers over your lips, and even through that white divider you can linger in the warm, tingly sensation of his breath on your skin.

He squeezes your arms before letting you go and giving the handkerchief back. But when his eyes can see your face again, worry fills them again.

“Are you alright?” he asks.

You frown, puzzled. “Yes, of course I am,” you say (and you mean); “why do you ask?”

“I... I don’t know,” he stutters, “you just looked tired somehow.” He examines your features, as if looking for something, then shakes his head. “Hah, don’t worry about it, I’m probably just projecting my own sleep deprivation on you. I’ve been in here too long.”

“Yes you have. And that’s why you need to get out of this hell hole soon.” Your gloved hand caresses his scalp in one last gesture of comfort. “Promise to meet me outside later?”

“I promise.”

“Good.”

 

When you’re removing your work gloves in your room, alone with your thoughts, you start to believe that you do feel tired. You press a hand to your forehead. How didn’t you notice before? It’s burning.

——

Your abdominal pain is getting worse. You can’t stay up for more than ten hours without chugging twice the caffeine you’re used to, that is when you can actually keep it inside your stomach without vomiting it down a sink immediately after.

It’s been less than a week since that day at the market, of which you’re reminded as soon as you sit up on your bed and darkness engulfs your field of vision again, and you’re only now starting to notice the eerie similarities between your current state and the Plague victims’ symptoms. You’d rather not do that, but at the same time you can’t help but expect the worst.

——

When you start vomiting blood, you decide to snatch a bottle of mixed medical herbs and vinegar from Julian’s failed experiments shelf. No one is using it, so you may as well experiment a little on yourself. You hide it in a satchel under your vest while he’s not looking, hoping that, somehow, drinking it will give you a chance to slow down the spreading of the disease while you still got hope.

He doesn’t need to know yet. And it’s not like telling him would change anything anyway. Knowing would only stress him out even more, you reason with yourself.

For just a little longer, silence is your answer.

——

You begin to use magic to cover up any suspicious trace of illness on your body. 

It doesn’t take too long for you to become too weak for any spell to last long, so you start catching discreet breaks from work much more frequently than before.

It’s at times like these that you wish you were as powerful as Asra was. Gods, who knows where he is now. Probably far away from Vesuvia, far away from this madness, like he told you he would the last time you saw him.

Sometimes, in instants of weakness, you almost wish you had gone away with him.

——

Quaestor Valdemar claims they can smell the stench of death from all around you, but you try not to mind it too much. Everything smells like death down there, so that doesn’t necessarily mean they know what you are doing behind Julian’s back.

You freeze in your tracks, terrified, when, as soon as Julian leaves to shut himself inside his office again, their voice, cold and disgusting in your ears, murmurs that they can’t wait for the time they’ll be able to get their hands on your fresh corpse.

——

If your fingers only hurt, you wouldn’t have to cover them this often, but the area around your nails is becoming a very visible and ugly shade of grey. You tell Julian thicker gloves are another precaution you want to take against infection, and, even if you know it’s not right, you’re proud of yourself for making him believe you.

As days pass, your hands get colder, and the pain almost unbearable, but at least you can still feel them.

——

You don’t trust yourself with surgical tools anymore, not even for simple tasks like patching up a small wound. When Julian’s operating, you change other patients’ gauzes, which requires much less precision of movement. “I don’t want to distract you” is your go-to excuse for not aiding him anymore.

You’re lucky - or maybe you’re not - he’s too preoccupied to notice how much your fingers are shaking all the time.

——

The day you look in the mirror to notice the color of your scleras has become almost pinkish, you realize it’s not gonna be long before you’re finally found out by everyone else. You can’t cover a whole body disease for much longer.

In addition to the pain caused by the Plague, now anxiety contributes to making your movements more nervous and erratic. If you keep it like this, you fear you’re going to make a fatal mistake soon.

——

It happens the very next day, in the operating room. Julian asks you to fetch a scalpel from a drawer. You lean forward, extending your arm to grab it from a counter. Nothing too difficult, not even for you in this condition, but-

 

You don’t know exactly how it happened: one second you‘re standing, the next you’re on the ground, dizzy and surrounded by knives and a broken jar of leeches. Your cheek is bleeding out, cut by a shard of glass and, no matter how much you try to find the strength, you just. can’t. stand. up.

You can recognize a voice shouting somewhere near you, then the sound of steps. The two of you are alone in the room with an anesthetized patient, but it’s only when your head is lifted from the ground by his strong hands that your mind is clear enough to understand it is Julian who has come to your rescue.

You really want to cry.

It takes a while to regain your ability to speak after the fall, but when you do it’s only to apologize.

“I can’t believe I’ve done this while you were operating” you say in wet, almost incomprehensible sobs, not sure if shaken more by the white pain you feel through your entire body or by the grief. Maybe both. “I’m so sorry. I’ve become a hindrance. I’m sorry, I’m sorry...” you repeat, unable to tell if you’re only thinking it or saying it out loud at this point.

“Don’t say that. You’re not a hindrance. I would never have made it this far without you,” the sweet voice of Julian reassures you.

It’s not true, I am useless, you want to say, but before you can open your mouth again he silences you with a gentle caress.

“Just let me take a look at your wounds.” _Oh, so it’s multiple wounds._ “I‘ll put you on a table and see what I can do.”

You can barely feel him lift you up from the floor, but it’s when he tries to remove your gloves that an adrenaline rush causes you to suddenly regain lucidity. He can’t find out, he can’t find out, he can’t-

“N-no, no please,” you blurt out, desperately clinging on his sleeve with the little of strength you still have in you. But it’s too late. You can tell he’s seeing right through you.

He knows.

_This is it. It’s over._

The stunned expression on his face as he looks at your blackened, blistered hands is almost too much to bear. There is a long silence, the only sounds in the room being that of the crackling fire of the lamps on the walls and that of your heart, pounding in your ears in sheer panic.

——

“How long?” he asks, his voice low, a barely audible whisper.

“How long have you been hiding this from me?” he asks again, his speech cracking with every syllable as he takes your hand and holds it close to his chest.

You’re so ashamed you can’t bring yourself to answer, nor to look at Julian’s pained expression. You think back to all the times in the last weeks you lied to him, you stole from him, all in an attempt to ease the burden on his shoulders. And now you can see the proof of your utter failure in the expression of self-loathing tainting his face.

_It wasn’t supposed to go like this._

“Why didn’t you tell me you were sick? I thought you were fine, I thought I had protected you. I could have-... we could have....”

He never finishes that sentence, tears openly streaming down his face now, soaking your clothes and sliding on your skin when, desperate, he buries his face in the crook of your neck. He knows as well as you do that the moment you fell ill there was nothing to be done anymore. Your death sentence was already signed.

“I’ve been so selfish” he continues, “keeping you here with me when I knew the risks. You had nothing to do with this. You were fine.”

He tries, with difficulty, to regain his composure, letting out shaky breaths. Risks be damned, he lets his free hands run over the swollen skin of yours, caressing them as if his loving gesture would magically heal them.

“I thought that, if you were beside me, I could have sheltered you from every danger.”

“Ilya, I’m not dead yet.” You say, calling him by his most intimate name, in an attempt to stop him from thinking of useless _what ifs_.

_Yet._

That small, pregnant word doesn’t pass unnoticed, by you nor him.

Neither of you say another word. You let him cry until there are no more tears left to shed.

——

You’re laid in a bed inside his office, provided with all the commodities Julian could find and far away from the rest of the patients in the facility. He never lets you near the other patients, nor the other doctors, for that matter. He would never let you become just another number to add to the already long list of failed experiments thrown to the beetles.

Your mind is almost constantly foggy, but you can hear shouting in the distance, coming from somewhere near the entrance of the laboratory. The noise is loud just enough to let you make out a few words. The first, very agitated voice belongs to the doctor, and the second one, to your surprise, sounds just like that of the Countess of Vesuvia.

 

“................”

“....…demar has informed me….........incredibly irresponsible of you........”

“...........”

“..............”

“.... can’t let.... horrible place, alone.........”

“........ want to infect the entire city? ...... expect me to let.........”

“........................”

“........-”

“........ not like the others!”

“What makes it so different this time? .............. everything you’ve worked for ........”

“..............................”

“.......”

 

You know what they’re talking about. You’re still aware enough to know the Lazaret is waiting for you, just as Quaestor Valdemar likes to remind you from time to time.

It’s not like you haven’t accepted your fate, anyway. You’ve had many days to come to terms with the fact that you are dying. You’re ready to face your end.

If only you could see Asra one last time, and apologize for that last, horrible argument you had. You should have never let him leave like that. If only your magic was stronger. If only you could ease Julian’s pain. There are so many regrets in your life. Wounds that can never be healed. Friendships that can never be restored. Love that can never be fulfilled. There’s so much you need to do, and no time left for anything anymore.

When you pass out, it is to the sound of sobbing outside your door.

——

Julian insisted to come with you to the Lazaret. He refuses to leave you alone, to the very end, and you’re not strong enough to refuse.

 

You thought there would be screaming and moaning everywhere, but, just like you, every other victim has come to the point of silent acceptance.

Women, men, children, elders, all of them are spread over beds, on the floor, everywhere inside and outside the building, waiting for the time they’ll be burned in the crematory.

Most of them are alone, abandoned by everyone they knew or left behind by already departed loved ones. You’re one of the lucky few who are assisted, even here; Julian is kneeling beside you, his lips pressed to your hand, black like a piece of charcoal. If they chopped it off, you wouldn’t even notice.

“It’s not gonna be long now,” you try to reassure him, smiling as wide as your body allows you to. A quick and peaceful death for you is the only hope you can give him now.

“I’m here,” he chants, a trembling mess. “I’m here. I’m here,” a repeated mantra. It’s as if the sound could drive away from his mind the thought that you’re gonna be gone soon.

He never lies. He never wastes time to tell you you’re gonna be okay, that a cure will be found and that everything is going to be fine, and you’re thankful for that. There is no more space for wishful thinking now; only each other’s presence can give you at least a little peace of mind as you wait for the end.

You don’t wanna tell him you love him, not now, of all times. He knows already, and the pain of hearing it one last time would be way too much to bear, for both of you. Instead, in your last moments of lucidity, you just tell him, almost jokingly, that you’re gonna see him in the morning, once you wake up.

He can’t answer you. Not without bursting into tears again. He just nods with glassy eyes, overcome by emotion, and squeezes your numb limb to his body.

“Ilya...” is the last, loving word you say, for him alone to hear. You open your eyes, just to look at his beautiful face one last time, and, suddenly seized by dread, your breath catches in your throat as you see the redness in his scleras.

_No. No. Please. Not him too!_ , you beg to no one in particular. _This is all because of me. I made him become reckless. I let him do this to himself. He’s gonna be alone, now. It’s my fault-_

It’s with immense fear, guilt and despair that you feel your consciousness slip away from you. You don’t get to be at peace. And it’s with that second, physical prophecy of inescapable death that you fade out of existence.

Julian calls your name, over and over, but it’s too late: his screams can’t reach you anymore.

——

——

The Countess has asked you for a card reading. “How very appropriate,” she ponders when she sees the Magician’s card, and you wonder what she means by that when you’re opening the door again for her.

For a moment, you’re frozen at the door of your and Asra’s shop, long after she’s vanished into the mist.

All that talk of your “reputation”. could it be that she mistook you for...

“Strange hours for a shop to keep.”

_Who said that?_

Your gaze darts around the shop, chasing shadows in the dark.

“... Behind you.”

Sure enough, when you look, you see a figure looming against the door.

“Now, sources say this is the witch’s lair. So, who might _you_ be?”

Your heart starts racing as the masked intruder advances.

“W-Wh-Who’s asking?” you manage to spit out. It’s enough to give them pause.

“I’m asking. I’d rather not do it again. But if it will make you talk...”

The squeal of leather makes you wince as the stranger reaches for their mask and tosses it to the floor.

“Well, I can tell by the look on your face. Shock. Horror. You know who I am, don’t you.”

To your surprise, you _do_ know him. This man, they used to call him...

“Doctor Jules?”

**Author's Note:**

> I really meant to keep working on my ongoing Jojo fic, but then Book XIII happened and I couldn’t help myself. _(:3 」∠)_
> 
> On an unrelated note, I’ve been listening to the Heathers musical soundtrack for weeks now. Don’t you think Julian would love playing JD’s character? I can just see him acing that role.


End file.
